This is also not another of those articles where I go to town praising one app over the other. Note-taking tools are as much about our individual needs as they are about the habits we form with each of them. Google Keep may be Google’s answer to Evernote… but it is no Evernote or Microsoft OneNote. Google Keep is better for temporary notes, while Evernote is exceptional for keeping things long-term.

My own workflow includes both Evernote and Google Keep. The former does the heavy-lifting and storage. The latter is for jotting down quick notes. These quick notes don’t need the bloat of features and that’s where Google Keep fits in nicely. Plus, Google Keep is a part of the Google ecosystem and syncs across all the digital devices you can think of – including the Apple Watch. It works offline too.

Remember: You can go into Google Keep’s Settings and change the reminder defaults for Morning, Afternoon, and Evening.

Turn It into a Visual Bucket List

I am a big fan of Trello as a vision boardHow to Create a Vision Board and Meet Your Big GoalsHow to Create a Vision Board and Meet Your Big GoalsYou can call them as big rocks or big, hairy, audacious goals. Some call it a bucket list. Emptying that bucket calls for action. This is where a visual tool like Trello proves useful.Read More. Google Keep’s grid view is powerful enough to also act like a collage board of your goals. It could be a bucket list for life, or a visual New Year resolutions board. It goes without saying that you should spend some time thinking about what your dreams are and what you want to achieve for the year and for the years beyond — and Google Keep can help.

Drag and drop visually motivating images into the notes or use the camera icon to snap photos with your smartphone. With thoughtful labelling, turn Google Keep into your vision board, brain dump, and to-do list manager.

You can use color codes to show progress or indicate a time frame for the goals. Use checkboxes to break down the goals into as many mini-steps as possible. Here’s a snapshot of my vision board:

Focus with an Anti-Distraction List

We live in the age of productivity. We are also living in an age of endless distractions. An oft-quoted study on the cost of interrupted work (PDF) suggests that we need an average of 25 minutes to return to any task after a distraction. While there are many strategies to deal with workplace interruptions, Google Keep can be a simple device to handle the small stuff that calls for our partial attention.

For instance, establish a rule to offload any random thought or question to Google Keep that attacks your mind while working. Form a “Fire-Forget-Delete” mini-habit to shoot off your random musings.

“When is the TV show tomorrow?”

“How much should I budget for the trip?”

“What was the name of the manager in XYZ Inc.?”

Instead of searching for the answers right away, you can come back to them when you take a break. Try the always-in-top Panel View for Keep Chrome extension to send off these quick notes.

I have found the Voice Notes feature on Google Keep to be particularly effective for catching these offhand musings. It also automatically transcribes the audio to text.

Doodle Your Thoughts

Add drawings to your Keep notes. This only works on Android, but it’s useful if you want to just doodle away, draw directions for someone, share a photo, or annotate on top of an image. Alternatively, go ahead and play a game of Pictionary with your friends.

See how artist and illustrator Josh Pomeroy uses Google Keep in his workflow:

The drawing feature gives you three pen styles (pen, marker, and highlighter) and 28 different colors to choose from. You can also add drawings to existing notes.

Hack Your Shopping with Shared Lists

This is arguably one of the most potent use of Google Keep. Families can use shared Keep notes for running grocery shopping.

Here are three ideas:

Pick something up when you are returning from office and tick it off. As the update is synced to all the collaborators in the family, they have one less thing to shop for.

Take on the bewildering aisles and mazes of a superstore by splitting up and checking things off on a Keep note. It can be a huge timesaver when you are rushed and the shopping isn’t a joy.

It is easy to drag and drop to re-order the checkboxes on a Keep note. Someone can re-order the priority of an item on the collaborative list for immediate attention.

You can also set a location reminder for a place and it will automatically pop the list up as a notification as you walk into the store. Of course, this might not work at every place in the world and location reminders can be a serious battery drain!

Plan Your Meals Every Day

Collaborative Google Keep notes can be followed up with shared meal plans. Google still hasn’t found a way to integrate Google Keep with Google Calendar for meal planning. That would be awesome – but the second workaround is to plan a week’s meals in advancePlan Weekly Meals in Under 1 Hour with 5 Web ToolsPlan Weekly Meals in Under 1 Hour with 5 Web ToolsThere is a way to eat healthy food that doesn't cost much and do so in a way that doesn't require too much effort on your part. That secret is weekly meal plans.Read More with location reminders in place to notify you about any necessary grocery shopping you might have to do. Shared notes also help make meal planning decisions seamless.

Tell us about your meal planning ideas with Google Keep in the comments. Would you prefer a single note for the week’s plan or a set of individual notes that you can rotate through the month? Here’s what my meal plan looks like for a day.

The Life-Changing 30-Second Note

It’s a habit I am trying to form with the simplicity of Google Keep. I attach a #30-second label to each note. I must say that when I revisit the notes later, it not only gives me a new angle to think about but also help to change my biases.

For those on devices running Android 4.2+, add thoughts quickly without unlocking your device with the lock screen widget. Those on iOS, can add Google Keep to the Today view of the notification center for quick access. Try a 30-second note and tell us in the comments if it helps you make new observations in any way.

Catch All the Wisdom with Book Notes

Amazon Kindle has its book highlights. You can easily export them to any digital notebook. But what about the physical books you read? Use Google Keep and its powerful Transcribe feature.

Click on the Camera icon in Google Keep. Take a photo or import an image from your photo gallery. You can crop the part you want to grab the text from in your camera app or the photo gallery. In the new note, click on the overflow menu (three vertical dots) and choose Transcribe Text. Google’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software goes to work and the text from the image appears in the note. Click Done. Your note should now contain the entire text from the book image.

Label your notes, or color code them. For specific quotations, I also set reminders in an attempt to remember all the stuff I read through the day.

Grabbing contact details from business cards is also a common use of Google Keep’s OCR.

The unofficial Category Tabs for Chrome extension is a huge help for sorting and organizing your stack of notes on Google Keep. Put it to good use with a labelling system when your notes start going haywire.

Google Keep works with Google Drive and you can combine both for solo or small team projects. Everything stays within the eco-system of a single ubiquitous tool. As an example, you can copy a note with an outline to Google Docs and expand it there.

I use Google Keep as bookmark for websites I want to revisit. I also combine it with my Evernote to set location-based reminders. I'll do my complex notes in Evernote, then share the note link to Google Keep and set a location-based reminder that allows me to bring up the Evernote info. I'm still learning Google Keep, but it's growing on me.

I like the "Doodle Your Thoughts" section. Josh shows how he, for some reason, exports all of his Keep sketches into Mischief and there groups them all into one file. In my case I need to keep the sketches and other graphics separate but that's where I get into trouble with Keep. I need to group several sketches under a single note using the text region as the explanation area.

Unfortunately Keep likes to rearrange my sketches and I can't figure out how or what the new sort is based upon. So why can't I simply use drag to reorder my sketch collection within a single note... the same way we drag to rearrange the notes themselves? Is there ANY way to reorder a set of graphics attached to a single note?

My husband and I use lists for groceries, meals kids like, general shopping ( with serial/ part numbers) and use the reminders for repeat maintenance.

Recently started using keep for cute things kids say. After putting my kids baby books "somewhere safe" I find it's a lot more reliable. The great thing is if you share with others I've noticed they are adding to it. Adding photos, voice recordings or drawings also putting it up there with evernote.

I love using keep for re-usable lists. Let me explain, I am a single father of two young kids and every couple of weekends I take them to the cottage. Generally, we need the same stuff every weekend such as swimsuits, t-shirts and sunscreen in the summer and skates, helmets and snow pants in the winter. I use Google keep to maintain a list of everything I ever brought. When I am ready to plan a weekend I can unchecked my whole list and check off what I don't intend to bring. Now I have a list of what I need for the weekend without thinking of what I need. If I want to add to the list I just type it in. Also I don't check off items as I pack for the weekend. I check them off when I am packing to go home. It helps me prevent leaving items at the cottage

One thing I find useful is using Keep to pass data between my devices. I also use Keep for shared shopping lists and miscellaneous data. But there is one major and one minor problem that keep me from using it more.

First, Keep desperately needs the ability to just display titles. Cards take up far too much space on a phone and even on a PC. If I'm going to have to rely on tags and search I might as well be using Evernote or OneNote.

Second, sorting would be useful, both for cards and within lists. A creation and/or a reminder date/time sort would allow me to focus on new or old items; an alphabetic sort of titles and/or tags would allow me to add priority numbers.

I love using a Google Keep checklist as a shopping list. Picked it up? Check it off. Need to pick up some stuff but not sure what you should grab this week? Look at your checked off items for a reminder! Have it automatically pop up when you go to the store!

I use Google Keep quite a bit, and have even got my wife to use it. Being able to share a note or list is pretty powerful stuff.

I am a fairly handy guy and generally do most of my own maintenance & repairs. I have started keeping a note for each item I work on, writing down things like model number, serial number, what I do (and when) along with corresponding replacement part numbers. I will also attach photos of the item as I am taking them apart for reference later.

With the newish feature of being able to annotate images or add drawings on Android, I will take a photo of something that I am measuring, then sketch the measurements on the image.

Google Keep is rightfully a lightweight Evernote, but I never really clicked with using Evernote.

I use Keep this way myself, and it's saved me a lot of re-lookup of information on my lawn mower and appliances around the house. I also have each vehicle I own in there with respective VIN numbers, insurance policy numbers, anything relevant to owning and operating and repairing. When my daughter got married and moved out a couple years ago, my son-in-law was a little overwhelmed by the wealth of information I "bequeathed" to him (Whew! One big chunk of notespace cleared there!) about her car that I had stored in Keep.

The washing machine started acting up a couple years ago. In went links to various repair videos on YouTube, parts sales listings links on Amazon, E-Bay, et al, and any tips and tricks I happened to trip over on the way. End result: saved almost $1000 by not having to purchase a new washer (bittersweet for my lovely wife), a forgotten massive amount on the parts versus buying them from Sears, and probably a couple hundred smacks in labor bills by doing the (plug and play) work myself.

To the life-notetaking newbie this may likewise sound overwhelming, this massive data-gathering effort, but relax...it can start with one item (maybe the VIN number), and trust me, it will grow on its own until you realize like I did that you never could have done it without Keep. :) I've now got useful data on things around my home as esoteric as specific horticultural routines for each type of tree in my yard. August brings a hord of Catalpa Sphinx Moth caterpillars to my Catalpa trees (we colloqually call them Catawba trees and Catawba worms here in the South), so I like to know a little in advance to prepare to harvest them for my son-in-law for fishing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalpa

You get my drift. This process is good for any "entity" that you possess which requires any sort of maintenance or repair whatsoever, and before you know it you'll have a custom-made encyclopedia of lifehacks relevant to YOUR life. Sorry Mrs. Marilynn Humphries, who sold my parents a set of World Book encyclopedias in 1977. They were interesting and informative for the time, but concise and relevant is the new real.

Saikat is a techno-adventurer in a writer's garb. When he is not scouring the net for tech news, you can catch him looking for life hacks and learning tidbits. You can find him on LinkedIn & Twitter watching over the world.